A Bit of Sound Design

Crystallizer is a unique echo/delay plugin and I find it to be an amazing tool. I've been getting more familiar with its wide range of presets and using it to manipulate sound.

It's a bit difficult to describe what it does but it all makes sense when you hear it. The versatility is almost endless. Whatever sound you splice up can be pitched, reversed, delayed and filtered before being sent to the output.

I'd like to tell you I have some unique creative process to how I went about this, but basically I started out with importing a tonal hum sound effect into my session and began experimenting. As I processed the sound more it became apparent that I was going in the whoosh direction and kept on tweaking. Feel free to take a listen:

Thoughts on Foley

Charles Maynes recently wrote an excellent Designing Sound article that I suggest reading.

Maynes discusses the importance of Foley in elevating the overall sound design despite its lower standing in the post sound hierarchy. I couldn't agree more with his perspective, and Douglas Murray has a great point in the comments section that Foley adds the "detail and weight that are helpful for believability and to glue the sound effects together."

As an editor, I have spent a lot of my time focusing on Foley. I find it important to communicate with a client the need for Foley and as others have pointed out in the comments, Foley can be a great medium for character development and emotional elements.

It got me reminiscing about when I had the opportunity as an intern to check out Gary Hecker's work during the post production of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2. It was amazing how an experienced Foley artist and mixer can sync sounds for virtually anything. The dynamic between the Foley team and Foley Supervisor Chris Alba was very interesting to say the least. I could go on and on, but it'd be better to just check him out in action: